Arbetsmarknadens jobbsammansättning, jobbpolarisering och tekniskt driven automatisering under Sveriges rekordår 1940–1970

In this paper, I investigate changes in the job market composition during Sweden’s “Golden Age” between the end of WWII and the 1974 oil crisis to examine to which degree this reflects an earlier job polarization than previously thought and validates that era’s anxieties about automation. Drawing from individual income and occupational data from a representative sample of the Swedish population from the year 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970 and using the Historical International Standard of Classification of Occupations (HISCO) to make the data sets comparable, I demonstrate a general decrease in the share of blue-collar professionals and a general increase in the share of white-collar professionals, as well as a transition from unskilled to semi-skilled and skilled jobs. This indicates skill-biased technological change as the underlying force in the Swedish economy at the time, refuting Gustavsson’s (2017) previous findings regarding an early Swedish job polarization as well as general claims about deskilling. Lastly, using Acemoglu’s (2017) framework for enabling and replacing technologies, I argue the degree to which the pervasiveness of enabling technologies helped shape the Swedish Golden Age has been underappreciated, carrying lessons for our current era of generation-defining technologies and contemporary discussions surrounding automation.